Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin (41 page)

In 1991, the careers of Aretha and Luther were moving in different directions. His latest album,
Power of Love,
maintained his bestselling status, while Aretha hadn’t enjoyed a number-one hit since she had recorded with George Michael, five years before.

When she played Radio City again in September,
New York Times
critic Stephen Holden wrote, “The singer has long aspired to a Las Vegas style of showmanship that seriously undermines what she does best, which is to perform unadorned, gospel-flavored pop with the passion and spontaneity of a church singer. Echoes of that passion invariably find their way onto her records, even a scattershot concoction like her newest album, ‘What You See Is What You Sweat.’ ”

Ever mindful of maintaining a high public profile, in November Aretha appeared on the TV sitcom
Murphy Brown,
looking considerably heavier than she did in the photos accompanying her
current album. At the piano, she sang “Natural Woman” while Candice Bergen sang the background parts.

Aretha’s tradition of throwing herself birthday parties continued in March 1992, when she turned fifty. In a Detroit hotel ballroom, the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by Duke’s son Mercer, entertained. Among the two hundred guests were members of the Detroit Pistons, several local broadcasters, and her brother Vaughn.

“Aretha and I became much closer after Cecil died,” said Vaughn, Aretha’s older half brother. “I’d come to Detroit for certain parties and was always grateful to be included. Aretha might get blue sometimes, but these social occasions never failed to perk her up. She also began calling me to help her arrange her travel and keep her business affairs in order. The calls became more frequent in the nineties when she was having some problems with the IRS. I had retired from a long military career in 1974, when I was forty. Afterwards I had lived in the South, where I worked for the postal service. When Aretha asked me to help her I was already in my sixties and contemplating a calm retirement. Show business held no appeal for me. At the same time, because of the great love I had for the mother that Aretha and I shared, I saw my duty. Because I’m basically a trained soldier used to regimentation, it wasn’t easy. The soldier’s life is about discipline. The artist’s life is about mood. Mood determines whether you’re going to play a concert or cancel it. Mood determines whether you’re going to stick to your recording schedule or ignore it. This was a new world for me, with new rules. I had to learn to bend with the breeze and go with the flow. This was not my style, and for many years I found myself in an uncomfortable position. I found it unpleasant to be put in a position where I had to apologize for Aretha’s mercurial moods. The money part was also not easily understood. My sister made a great deal but always needed a great deal more. I understood her relationship to money when I noticed that when she left her dressing room for the stage, she always took her purse with her. That purse stayed with her onstage for as long as she sang. She carried the cash to pay those who worked for her. I tried to get her to do this by
check so she could have a receipt. But there were no receipts. She paid cash on the barrelhead.”

“Nearly every Aretha gig that I booked,” said Dick Alen of the William Morris Agency, “required that of her total fee, she had to have twenty-five thousand in cash before she went onstage. That was the money she used to make her payroll. She deducted no taxes and made no records. I’d beg her to implement some system of documentation, but she refused. I knew that eventually there’d be hell to pay from the IRS.”

“For all the money complications,” said Vaughn, “her mood changed the minute that Bill Clinton came on the scene. It was more than the fact that, like us, he was a Democrat. He was also a music man, a saxophonist himself, and someone who loved rhythm and blues. Aretha figured she’d be hearing from him in no time. And she did. She worked for [his campaign], and once he was elected, he never forgot her. He put her back on that throne. He helped keep her in the newspapers. He gave her the props she deserved.”

In the summer of 1992, fifty-year-old Aretha Franklin sang the national anthem at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Bill Clinton. That same summer, while her Arista album sales sagged,
Amazing Grace,
cut on Atlantic twenty-one years earlier, was certified double platinum.

“I remember calling her with that wonderful news,” said Jerry Wexler. “I knew that she was increasingly having a hard time selling records and that piece of news would warm her heart. Of course she was happy. We reminisced for a while and I was feeling good vibes coming my way. That gave me the courage to suggest that maybe we should go back in the studio and cut a classic album, either all blues or all jazz, something for the ages. That suggestion killed our conversation. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘Clive has Babyface and L. A. Reid writing for me. You know who they are, don’t you, Jerry?’ Of course I knew. They’d just done Whitney’s ‘I’m Your Baby Tonight.’ But when, in the most diplomatic way possible, I asked Aretha whether she thought their material might be a bit
young for her, she took great offense. That set off another long period of silence when, in her view, I became persona non grata.”

That summer she traveled to New York to perform at the Friars Club roast of Clive Davis at the Waldorf Astoria. Among the performers were Dionne Warwick, Kenny G, and Barry Manilow. Aretha insisted that she go last. Then came the shocker: She came out wearing a tutu and started twirling about with a troupe from the City Center Ballet Company.

“When she told me what she was going to do,” said Ruth Bowen, “I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to tell her that she’d look ridiculous—and she did. But it was another one of those times when Aretha’s sense of reality was off. In her mind, she looked graceful and demure. But to the world, she looked like a dancing hippo. And the thing that killed me most was her reasoning for doing it. She said it was out of respect for Clive!”

In
The Soundtrack of My Life,
Davis’s autobiography, he wrote, diplomatically, “She went through pirouettes and dancing with very impressive agility.”

“Mr. Davis was the one man she seemed to respect above all others,” said Vaughn. “She felt that because he had knowledge of and access to all the current hit writers and hit producers, she couldn’t afford to alienate him. At the same time, I often heard her tell him that she was also going to record her own compositions. She didn’t need his approval for that. That was a given.”

“Including songs she had written on each album was a way to guarantee extra income,” said Dick Alen. “You could hardly blame her for that.”

“I think if she had focused more or been open to collaborate more, Aretha might have added to that short list of hit songs that she wrote,” said Billy Preston. “But if I ask the average Aretha fan to name one song she wrote after leaving Atlantic in the seventies, I’ll get a blank stare. Same with Ray Charles. What did he write after ‘What’d I Say’? You can’t tell me because that was his last self-penned hit.”

“I wouldn’t call my sister lazy,” said Vaughn, “because every year she does travel and play a certain amount of dates. But when she’s home she can lack a certain discipline. Coming out of the military, discipline is my second nature. With Aretha, though, she has to fight the tendency to just hang around the house for weeks at a time, sitting on the couch and doing nothing but watching TV and eating. A couple of times I tried to say something about how those habits can be debilitating, but she bit my head off—so I never opened my mouth again.”

The idea of singing a duet with the great Teddy Pendergrass, then in a wheelchair, was enough to get Aretha off the couch and onto the stage at the Mann Music Center in Philadelphia.

For decades Erma Franklin had lived with the notion that her musical gifts were largely underappreciated. So it was particularly cheering when, in November of 1992, her career was briefly revived: her version of “Piece of My Heart,” featured in a new European commercial for Levi’s jeans, was released in England. It sold 100,000 in the UK alone and was played on the Continent as well. Due to its widespread popularity, Erma was asked to shoot a video.

“I loved it all,” she told me, “and was excited to be back in the public eye—even if the public was Great Britain rather than America. The English have such a deep appreciation of our music that I couldn’t help but be flattered by the attention. I received a couple of lucrative offers to appear in London. They requested that Aretha and I do a concert together. Millions were being offered. I had long ago accepted and empathized with my sister’s fear of flying and told the promoters that she would never agree. The promoters countered with a half dozen first-class tickets on a luxury liner. For a while Aretha considered it but never made the commitment. Then the deadline passed and so did the opportunity. I had no illusions that it would have resuscitated my long-dormant public
profile. I just thought it would have been fun. Basically, though, I continued to derive great satisfaction from my work at Boysville, then the largest child-care agency in Michigan. To see the rehabilitation of children who had been neglected, delinquent, and often abused was a beautiful thing. At this point in my life, even if I could have had a recording or concert career, I’m not sure I would have chosen to do so. I was so grateful to God that I had survived the crazy emotions of an earlier life in show business and continued to pray that my sister could keep surviving as well.”

The survival of Aretha’s career, both artistically and commercially, was indeed nothing short of remarkable. Just when you suspected that she was on an irreversible downward slide, she seemed to find a way to get back up. Given her status as one of the great singers of the century, opportunities came her way. When filmmaker Spike Lee sought a grand conclusion to his 1992 film
Malcolm X,
he turned to Aretha. Aretha reached out to Arif Mardin, and his arrangement of Donny Hathaway’s “Someday We’ll All Be Free” put her back in the same down-home churchy mode of
Amazing Grace,
her classic gospel album. As she sang the song over the credits of Spike Lee’s film, the irony was inescapable: the story of one of Islam’s most famous converts is set to a Christian-sounding anthem.

As her vocal interpretations continued to soar, her financial situation hit rock bottom. At the end of the year, the IRS put a $225,000 tax lien on Aretha’s home in Bloomfield Hills due to a dispute over her 1991 taxes. “While she hasn’t been accused of a crime,” wrote
Jet,
“the lien represents the amount the legendary singer would have to pay the government if she sold the property.”

“Actually the IRS might have been doing us a favor by initiating those actions,” said Vaughn, “because, in response, Aretha would go to work. If she were inactive a long period of time, only something scary like a letter from the government would get her going. That made her realize that, win or lose, she needed to be
out there earning money. I wasn’t privy to the details about her tax problems, and maybe she was being unfairly singled out, but I do know that weeks after she got the IRS bill, she was on the phone with Ruth Bowen or Dick Alen looking for some bookings.”

For all her money problems, Aretha did not hesitate to work for free if it involved honoring an artist she respected. In December, for example, she appeared at the Kennedy Center Honors in tribute to jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.

“I have a rule about supporting Republicans,” Aretha explained, “and Lionel was a lifelong Republican. But when it came to Hamp, I broke my rule, because my dad loved him. We all did. Hamp had worshipped at New Bethel, and during a concert in Detroit, where Daddy had taken me and Erma, Hamp asked us onstage to do a little dance while he played behind us. Outside of church, that was probably my first time on a public stage. So I had to break party lines and honor the great Lionel Hampton and forgive the fact that he voted for the wrong party.”

A month later, Aretha was back with the right party, performing at several of Bill Clinton’s inaugural events.

“I saw how my sister is in her element when she appears at these galas with presidents and princes,” said Vaughn. “She really does become a queen and relates to them on an equal level. It was fascinating to see these foreign dignitaries responding to her like she was just as important and impressive as them. That’s when I first understood that Aretha is genuine royalty.”

Her singing in the nation’s capital garnered positive reviews, but her wardrobe did not. Animal rights activists complained about her full-length Russian sable coat.

Time
magazine titled the article “Respect? Fur-get It.” Reportedly, PETA sympathizers Alec Baldwin and Chrissie Hynde were outraged that Aretha had worn fur. A small furor followed.

“Aretha heard about the controversy and asked me to find the articles criticizing her,” said Vaughn. “I didn’t want to do it. You know what the queen does when the messenger brings [bad] news.
I pretended like I couldn’t find the clippings but she wouldn’t accept the explanation. So I did what was asked of me. Fortunately, she didn’t take it out on me—but she did carry on for a good thirty minutes about who the hell are they to criticize what she wears. She wanted to know how many cows were slaughtered to make their leather shoes and what about the diamonds they wore—didn’t they come from those South African mines where workers were treated like slaves? She was livid.”

Aretha wrote a brief defense in
Vanity Fair.
“We’re all using a lot of leather with respect to our shoes and handbags and things like that, so come on, let’s be for real.”

In April of 1993, her public relations were lifted somewhat by her Fox television special
Aretha Franklin: Duets.
The concert, a benefit for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, took place at New York City’s Nederlander Theater. Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, Rod Stewart, and Gloria Estefan performed. Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro gave spoken tributes. Other than a warm and winsome duet with Smokey Robinson on his hit song “Just to See Her,” I found it a dull and schmaltzy show-business affair.